D&D 5E Ability Score Balance: through the eyes of fresh players

[Don Durito]

Unrelated crazy idea:

Fighting Styles
You can learn one style and an additional number of styles equal to your Intelligence modifier. (I would go so far as to indicate with INT 8 you won't get a style, but I am an evil, cruel, and wicked DM. )

Since many styles don't have crazy synergies, I don't think this would be too OP on the surface, and it would give at least some benefit for Fighters, Paladins, and Rangers to have a decent INT score. With adding UA styles, you have a decent selection even for someone like a Fighter/Wizard (bladesinger).

Any big issues with this? At a glance I don't see any.

The only issue is that Defence Style synergies well with everything. But eh, it's just one point of AC.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I disagree. It’s not a question that no stat is or should be dumpable, it’s that no stat should be dumpable with impunity. There should always be a cost to doing so, and a player should recognize that they are accepting that cost by leaving or making a stat low. It doesn’t mean their stats should all be equal or that a player will actually embrace that psychology.

This is fine if (and only if) the costs for taking a low score are roughly even across all the non-primary ability scores.

If you're playing a wizard and you decide to put a low number into charisma, then you're not as good at skills you don't need and weren't expected to be good at anyways. If you put a low number into Constitution, you die early and often. These do not seem like equally deleterious outcomes to me. Which means you get a lot of shy clerics, but no scrawny ones.

I find that lack of variety to be detrimental to the game overall. Especially since it prevents really classic concepts that fit well into the game, like the absent-minded, clumsy, or sickly wizard. These should be playable, IMO.

I don't think that the clumsy wizard shouldn't notice that they're clumsy, and fail at things that require a lot of dexterity or grace like stealth or picking pockets, but I can't see a good reason for the game to eliminate that concept entirely by making them bad at not dying.

(I'm also quite alright with making stupid wizards a non-option. That's tied directly to the concept of a wizard in a way that grace and agility are not.)

 

[jmartkdr2]

I think part of it is what you consider dumping a stat. For me, that is an 8 (i.e. no improvement off of the base for point-buy). If you are rolling stats, you might get one or even two sometimes.

I don't think leveling them out makes it necessary to have flatter arrays as you suggest, but it does make having them a bit more beneficial.

I meant that if having an 8 in anything made the character unlikely to succeed at adventures, (whichj is what I mean by non-dumpable), then you will only make characters more similar by reducing the number of available options.

 

[Don Durito]

It's a difficult issue to solve. (Assuming you want to).

Some solutions would be:

• having class options/builds that make all possible secondary stat builds viable. 4E was going this way somewhat at one point. Cons: a lot of bloat, and it's not all that helpful if you want to be a smart fighter, but the particular combat options that interest you require Wis - especially if that requirement ends up being something of an arbritrary choice.
• having some kind of point buy system in place where the cost of ability scores is actually different dependent on the value of that ability score to the class in question (so an high Strength would workout being extremely cheap for a wizard. Cons: overly complex and difficult to get the balance right.
• Rolling all the ability scores in order and just assigning them Cons: solution worse than problem.
• Assigning a basic score in primary ability score/s and then just rolling the others. (Cons: still doesn't necessarily allow you to create the character you envisage).
• Using arrays that are better at the low end (while a Paladin in heavy armour with an extra 14 is still better off mechanically putting that in Dex, it's not better by enough that it may not still be worth it to the player to put that in Intelligence if that's how they envisage their characer - at 14 we're now starting to get to the point where you have sufficient mechanical heft to actually begin to realise the concept of smart Paladin - just). Cons: May not actually work - heavily player dependent.

 

[Kinematics]

What I've seen is that it's mainly a problem of the Standard Array. With the Standard Array, you must have an 8 somewhere in your build. When you go to point buy, it's more common (but not guaranteed) for the player to not want to have stats falling below average (and have a penalty), so you'll mostly see 10's as a baseline before trying to raise something higher.

So the problem of the dump stat (outside of rolled stats) arises because the system forces a dump stat to exist.

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I honestly like PF2's character creation steps. It uses neither rolled dice nor point buy, but instead builds the stats out of ancestry, background, and class buffs.

Pros:

It's easy to see some stats influenced by birth (nature), but just as much have other stats influenced by what you did growing up (nurture).

It feels like a better implementation of race to separate it into ancestry (genetics) and heritage (culture). It doesn't quite match up to all the subrace possibilities (eg: genasi elements), but for the most part heritage seems a better tool than subrace. It also makes it easier to fit characters of one race that grew up in another culture (eg: Carrot in Discworld, the human who grew up as a dwarf).

It also fits in the Dragonmark "subraces" more easily. Those just become additional heritage options.

Everyone stats at a 10, which is 'average'. You're not forced to start out with a negative stat mod. It feels better to build off of average, and seeing how you deviate, than build off of 8 as a baseline, which implies everyone starts at "kinda sucky".

You don't buy your stats and then build your character on top of them; you build your character, and thus get a particular set of stats.


Cons:

It doesn't bother with odd numbered stats, though, which hinders the ability to mesh it with 5E's half-feats (+1 to a stat, plus some ability).

It leaves less room for "customizing" an oddball design. But one would naturally ask, then: do your stats really define your character? If your background was a caravan leader, does it matter whether you took an arrow to the knee in a bandit attack, leading to a lower Dex? Particularly if the only point of that was to trade out point for a higher Str, or something? Or is the fact that he was a caravan leader the important thing?

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I'd want to have a system where you pick:

Ancestry (Race)
Ancestry (Heritage)
Background
Class

And that's all you need to worry about. Maybe have a couple leftover points that you can assign based on life goals, or Ideals, or some such.

Anyone feel like trying to experiment with something like that?

 

[Lanefan]

If you want some bonus to HP, I have several suggestions:

• Add up the total modifiers for ability scores as an initial bonus at level 1. If a modifier increases or decreases, so do HP.

One thing I've always hewn to in the name of sheer simplicity is that hit points, once rolled or determined, are locked in for life other than exceptionally rare situations.

So, if your Con is 15 for your first four levels and then goes up to 16 at level five, your rolls from 5th-level onwards get the added benefit but there's no retroactive changes to what you got for the first four levels.

 

[Lanefan]

Quick clarification - is this the "I had a DC in mind that applied to all characters, and this player thinks they made it but didn't with their character's penalty"? In which case I agree with you - I'll give out incorrect information on a flubbed roll sometimes.

Or is it "with the mechanical penalty accounted for they made the DC, a rare event, but I'm going to give them an extra penalty on top by turning their rare success into misinformation?" In which case I'm against this. It's like "well, they missed your AC but you have a low DEX so you fall prone because I feel like it".

Bit of both.

Reason I'd do the latter would be to try to cut back on spamming Int checks if a player was doing so with a low-Int character in an attempt to game the system. I'd never do it where a character is being played in good faith, and it's usually pretty durn easy to tell the difference.

 

[Lanefan]

The DM determines when you can make a check, not the player.

If a player is constantly asking "Do I know anything about [xxxxx]?" then there's going to be a constant series of checks. Either that, or the DM just uses fiat to say no which probably woudn't go over very well.

I agree. This is where I would start as well. And then, I'd hand out inspiration when he starts role-playing his character as dimwitted.

Fine for those as uses inspiration or similar in their games. I don't, and have no plans to.

 

[Lanefan]

What I've seen is that it's mainly a problem of the Standard Array. With the Standard Array, you must have an 8 somewhere in your build. When you go to point buy, it's more common (but not guaranteed) for the player to not want to have stats falling below average (and have a penalty), so you'll mostly see 10's as a baseline before trying to raise something higher.

So the problem of the dump stat (outside of rolled stats) arises because the system forces a dump stat to exist.

This presumes that the answer to "Is the existence of a low stat a problem?" is universally "Yes", which is not true at all.

We joke here sometimes when rolling up characters "Good - I just rolled a 7 - now it's playable!"

 

[Kinematics]

This presumes that the answer to "Is the existence of a low stat a problem?" is universally "Yes", which is not true at all.

We joke here sometimes when rolling up characters "Good - I just rolled a 7 - now it's playable!"

I did explicitly exclude rolled stats, because those have a different dynamic.